GOP leaves debt accord in dust

Moving right and bleeding moderate votes, Republicans narrowly won House approval Thursday of their plan to shift tens of billions from poverty programs to protect the Pentagon from automatic cuts under the August debt accords.

The long-term unemployed, who have swelled the food stamp rolls, are among the most vulnerable, together with single-mother households and working-class immigrant families. Depressed swing states like Florida would begin to feel the pinch in late summer, and the 167-page bill carries with it big implications for the November elections and the fiscal crisis facing Congress in the weeks after.

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Inside the House, the 218-199 vote placated party conservatives and minutes later helped the leadership win passage of the first of the 2013 annual appropriations bills covering law enforcement and science agencies.

But among the 16 Republican “nays” on the spending cuts were significantly more GOP moderates – lawmakers who had remained loyal in the budget debate little more than a month ago.

Indeed, some of the same House cuts have been opposed in the past by the party’s young Republican political star, Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, often mentioned as a potential running mate of presumptive GOP nominee Mitt Romney. And by moving so far to the right, the House risks making it more likely — not less — that the January sequester could happen.

There is growing sentiment among Senate Democrats — reflected in comments this week by Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) — that the party should hang tough behind the Budget Control Act and gamble that strong medicine is needed to jolt the political system back toward the center and compromise.

“I’m not about to walk away from that agreement — that’s a bill we passed,” Reid told reporters Thursday. “The president feels the same way.”

House Democrats — all standing for reelection in November — are typically more skittish. But in a debate on the House floor, Rep. Jim McGovern (D-Mass.) told his colleagues that the Republican bill “actually makes sequestration look good.”

“The bill before us would create a government where there would be no conscience,” McGovern said. “It is outrageous. It takes my breath away.”

Building on the March budget resolution, the measure continues what has become an aggressive Republican rewrite of last summer’s agreements both in terms of annual spending caps and now the sequester mechanism. Nondefense appropriations in 2013 already face cuts of $27 billion from what was anticipated under the Budget Control Act, and the new measure adds a second round of savings, culled from President Barack Obama’s signature initiatives as well as core benefit programs such as Medicaid, food stamps and the child tax credit.

The narrowness of this approach — shunning any cuts from defense or tax shelters — is a worry for party moderates.

“I am one who thinks you have to put everything on the table,” Rep. Frank Wolf (R-Va.) told POLITICO. A representative of Rep. Ed Whitfield (R-Ky.) echoed that sentiment: “We must put everything on the table.”

Romney can’t ignore the action as he tries to position himself for the fall campaign. And recalling his own days in the Michigan state Senate, Rep. Sander Levin (D-Mich.) said it was a far cry from when he had worked in a bipartisan way with Romney’s father, the late Gov. George Romney.

“I directly engaged in give and take and negotiated final legislation with Gov. George Romney, resulting in legislation that passed on a bipartisan basis,” Levin said. “Today the radicalization of the Republican Party would make that impossible.”